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From this holocaust, very little was saved. Of the countless books described, only four codices are known. The rest were burned. The stelae and architectural works which today provide the bulk of evidence for the Maya culture are largely those the jungle had reclaimed before the Conquista and were thus spared only because the good men of God were ignorant of their existence. |
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As a consequence of this culturcide, the relationship between written and spoken Maya was lost for centuries. The Maya hieroglyphs were a mystery to scholars when they were rediscovered in the 19th century and remained so for years. |
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A great deal of the scholarship regarding the Maya is, therefore, just so much learned claptrap. Scholars managed to decipher the numbering system and some of the mathematically oriented material, but the bulk of the texts defied translation for years. As a general rule of thumb, you should take anything written about the Maya prior to the 1990s, except for numerical material such as dates, with a very large grain of salt. |
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2.) The study of the Maya has changed enormously in the decade of the 1990s. The written language is being successfully cracked at last, and the resulting translations are changing our picture of the Maya radically in many ways. Some key ideas have emerged from this breakthrough: |
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2.1.) Contrary to many authoritative statements, the Maya were not ''obsessed with time". The Maya dated their public works, just as we do. Their public works form the bulk of the physical evidence, so our sample is skewed. We might study a modern cemetery and decide that contemporary people are similarly obsessed by time. Paleontologists might use the same logic to conclude that prehistoric creatures were obsessed with teeth. Time was very important to the Maya, as you shall see, but they did not worship it, as some have suggested. |
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2.2.) Astronomy played an important part in Maya culture. The Maya related their cosmology to celestial events, and they tracked many astronomical phenomena because of their cosmological and religious significance. |
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2.3.) Maya architecture literally expresses their celestial, and therefore, astronomical, knowledge. At Palenque, on the day of the winter solstice, the Sun just touches the sarcophagus of Pacal beneath the Temple of Inscriptions. At Chich'en Itza, the vernal equinox is observed as the shadows snake down serpentine balustrades of the pyramid called the Castillo. For years, archeologists excoriated the Maya for their misaligned buildings and their inability to lay out cities by the right angles found in Western culture. These misaligned structures are now known to be accurately aligned with celestial events such as zenith passages, solstices, and equinoces. |
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A general pattern in archeology has emerged over the past few decades. The more discovered about traditional agricultural societies, the more remarkably similar they appear in many ways. One of the major similarities is the architecture. Everywhere, pyramids and temples are oriented and constructed to express celestial relationships. The Maya, like the Egyptians, literally walked about in, and lived in, their calendar. |
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